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iTMS Launches in Japan
ickoonite writes "The iTunes Music Store has finally come to the Land of the Rising Sun! After months of tricky negotiations, Apple has reached agreements with 15 record companies for the supply of around 1 million tracks, with per-track prices between ¥150 and ¥200. AppleInsider also has some blurb, and Apple has an (English) press release on the launch is here. The question now is: 'Where next?'"
Comments?
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ITMS Ankh Morpork (running on Hex OS)
...
ITMS Xanth (running on Com-Pewter OS)
ITMS Amber (running on Ghostwheel OS)
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
japanese pop, here I come
You need a credit card based in Japan to purchase from the Japanese iTMS... stupid licensing laws.
THe problem that I really have with ITune's international support is that it doesn't allow you to go across borders. I can browse through music from the UK but as a US user I cannot buy any of it. That's kind of dumb consider I could buy the CD that way.
I'm assuming the reason this is the case is a track that costs $1 in the US might be $1.50 in the UK for the same artist.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Why can't this be universal? Why must "entertainment media" be regionalized? I mean I can sort of understand the supply and demand of physical media like DVDs but downloadable media files?
crazy dynamite monkey
Bigger news is that there are no Sony songs on iTMS Japan!
The story is that this is the current hold up in Australia. Sony/BGM in Australia won't allow iTMS Australia to use their songs unless Apple agrees to sell the songs in Apple's Fairplay AAC, Microsoft's Windows Media format, and Sony's own ATRAC format.
It looks like Apple Japan just went ahead without Sony on board. If only they would do that in Australia...maybe Sony BGM is just too big a monopoly in Australia to be able to do this?
because its cheaper to pop into town and buy freshly pressed CD's complete with packaging and no DRM or crappy quality for much less than 200yen
the record companies still don't get it
until they do, it won't change a thing
That's where CCP (credit card proxy) comes in to its own. You get a CC registered to any of 49 major countries (including Japan) - 'major' is defined as any country whose economy uses credit/debit cards for >5% of all transactions.
A useful (if difficult to find) service.
The awesome thing about the $5.00/month subscription service is that you are paying that $60 per year rental fee for as long as you want to enjoy your music. If I buy a song from iTunes, I can listen to it for 10 years for $.99. If I want to continue to listen to a song I'm renting from Yahoo, it would cost $600 to rent it for 10 years.
How about one universal store with all the music from every band availible for sale from them and not their record companies.
/idealism
RTFA again for the best results.
I can currently open iTunes and pick any store in any country. However, I cannot actually BUY anything from music stores in other countries. The next logical step is to allow people to buy music from other countries, making the iTMS actually international, unlike the way it is now, "choose country" button notwithstanding.
I dislike subscription services because they amount to extortion. Keep your subscription, or the music is effectively gone (rendered unusable). Assuming that I don't want to break the law, all the music I downloaded is useless to me if I decide to stop using the subscription service. Of course, iTMS files utilize DRM, but I can play tunes on five CPUs and unlimited iPods, as well as rip CDs. So although I don't have unlimited rights to do whatever I like with iTMS files, for my forseeable uses I feel like I'm getting a fair deal.
Beyond my general reticence toward subscription services, Yahoo's Music Unlimited doesn't work for me because:
1) I use an iPod. I don't think I'm alone in this.
2) I use a Mac. Y! Music Unlimited doesn't support the Mac.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Where next? The Moon of course, and then Mars.
What better DRM hegemony is there than the ability to turn off their air when they don't obey the corporate masters?
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Ulaanbaatar,+Mongoli a&spn=0.111235,0.240704&t=k&hl=en
Or that spot that's the most disant land location from any ocean- the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=46.283333,86.666667 &spn=0.229462,0.481407&t=k&hl=en
Or Mecca and Vatican city with free George Clinton songs. We can end this war if both sides can just be helped to get their funk on.
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=21.422224,39.826469 &spn=0.072718,0.120352&t=k&hl=en
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=rome&ll=41.902564,12 .452638&spn=0.015445,0.030088&t=k&hl=en
The Land Down Under doesn't have an iTunes store, yet, but they have lots of iPod users.
I really wanted to do things legal and pay for all my downloads, so I started using iTunes. Where I live (Netherlands), 90% of the songs I was looking for just missed. I expected there to be few Dutch songs, and there were. But, also many international songs that are there in the US version just miss. New albums are often not available in the local version, but are in the US. I switched back to eMule a few weeks ago, I just missed too many songs.
At least P2P won't make stupid regional stores that lack almost everything, the sound quality is just as good, I don't have to jump through hoops to put the music on my MP3 player, and it's cheaper. Pretty hard to see why it's so hard for the publishers to get a decent music download system working. I'm completely willing to pay for downloads, they just don't offer the option.
According to this: http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112256752830098 846,00-search.html?KEYWORDS=music+&COLLECTION=wsji e/archive/ Gracenote (the company that finds out the info about a CD when you put it in your computer) has 50 million tracks in their database... So over 50 million songs...
The article, being from the WSJ, is for paid subscribers only, but its quite interesting and talks about much of the stuff relevant to this thread - i.e., why the services don't have all the music you want.
According to AnimeNN, Apple's US iTunes Music Store has expanded their collection of Japanese J-pop and anime soundtrack downloads at the same time the Japanese store was opened. I'm hard-pressed to find any additions, but then again, I'm not much of a fan.
iTunes lets me listen to my purchased music on my Windows box, my Mac PowerBook, and my iPod.
Anything besides iTunes is Windows only, non-iPod only.
Apple is the only cross-platform solution, as weird as that may sound.
...the question is, when will the studios open up their gi-normous back catalogs for digital download? Decades of out-of-press, cool-ass music which could be a source of free revenue for the labels are languishing in magnetic-tape form in what I hope are climate-controlled vault conditions.
I think keeping old music on ice is the same as saying you don't want money.
And I hereby acknowledge that this post is only pretending to be shocked at the long-term, and evidently continuing idiocy of music labels.
http://www.farmerbob.org
Here's the free version.
As the article notes, Gracenote currently has 50 million tracks in their database, while current online offerings aspire to a mere 1.5 million songs. Clearly there is room for improvement.
However, one issue that the article doesn't address is how users might navigate the so-called "celestial jukebox". A large catalogue may be useful if one specifically knows the artist/album/song one is looking for, but browsing a catalogue such as Gracenote is impractical (especially since music can be relatively difficult to classify). I believe that personalisation will play a major role here - I'm still waiting for a comprehensive online service that provides recommendations on a par with those provided by Audioscrobbler. The iTunes store is very weak in this area, while Yahoo seems to have invested significant effort into this area (in terms of technology, it ties in nicely with their search personalisation). It will be interesting to see how important this aspect of the buying experience becomes as the depth of their respective catalogues increases.
Depending on the album, at 150 or 200 yen per song, albums can become quite a bit cheaper. For example, singles CDs, which typically cost anywhere between 800-1200 yen in Japan, are about 400-500 yen on iTunes. That's a nice discount! A 12 song album would be between 1800-2400 yen, which is also significantly cheaper. Jack Johnson's 14 track album was actually 1500 yen, which is a really good deal.
:) Well, they're just starting so hopefully things will improve, but it does give the impression that the Japanese market is even more hesitant to embrace an online download service than the US market was.
The unfortunate part, though, is that their selection is really just so-so. I couldn't find X-Japan, Tube, or Southern All Stars, all very big bands in Japan. I also couldn't find many newer favorites, like SMAP, Orange Range, L'Arc en Ciel, Aiko, etc. And anime fans would be disappointed to know that there really aren't many anime songs on there, aside from "Sonic X" songs.
Perhaps compile a list of the pirated tracks and send it (anonymously) to Sony BMG with a brief note saying:
"By blocking the iTMS Australia, you are losing money from me.
"Multiply my case by the hundreds of thousands of other frustrated consumers in the same situation and see if your accountants think that makes financial sense."
I've started listening to a bunch of Mandarin-language music lately, and for track-at-a-time sampling, I pretty much have no choice but to listen to unlicensed Internet radio stations (= piracy) or download from P2P networks (= piracy). I'd happily pay to sample a few more tracks by the artists I've heard on those radio stations, but there's no way for me to do it, and it's not worth paying through the nose to import a CD from overseas only to find that the track I heard was the only one on the disc worth listening to.
Oh well, yet another case of "I want to give them my money, but they won't let me." (See: DVD region coding, etc.) Guess I need a fancy MBA degree to see how that makes good business sense.
I'm the author of this piece about the iTMS and Australia. Sony is the hold out. I reckon, now that Japan has launched, Australia iTMS sans Sony won't be far behind. http://www.bulletin.ninemsn.com.au/bulletin/site/a rticleIDs/4DC115E462A7EF8ECA25702E0022FE20/
Peter Payne, the American-born founder of J-List, a source for all things Japanese, had this to say in today's instalment of his regular newsletter:
"After a long wait, Apple's iTunes Japan music store has finally opened, allowing customers here to download Japanese and international music for around $1.75 per song. Despite the large number of digital-savvy users in Japan, it's not at all surprising to me that it took so long for Apple to get the iTunes store up and running. Japan can be a very conservative place, and to big companies with established businesses, nothing is more terrifying than change, any change at all. Apple has had to navigate between greedy record companies who have kept the prices of CDs at the artificially high price of $30 for decades, and industry groups like the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) and the Recording Industry of Japan (RIAJ), who have closed ranks against any kind of digital distribution of music that doesn't guarantee more profits for them than conventional CDs. A big problem was JASRAC's insistence that Apple follow "Japan's rules" when it came to selling music online, which apparently meant that the industry group was to receive 7.7% of every song sold in addition to what the actual copyright holders receive. It's all very silly when you think about the fact that in Japan, you can go into any one of thousands of CD rental shops and rent a whole album for $3 or less. Sadly, Japan's copyright-happy record industry lacked the vision to allow Apple to sell Japanese music to customers outside of Japan, so worldwide fans of JPOP are shut out from participating in the Japan iTMS. Apple isn't the first company that's had to endure pressure from the establishment in Japan: Amazon was blocked from selling products below list price on their site here, since price fixing is still allowed for some products, like books and CDs. If there's one good thing that's come from the past decade of recession in Japan, it's that many of Japan's closed economic doors have been forced open, letting the light of competition and common sense flood in. If you want to see a hilarious commercial that marries the iPod with Sazae-san, one the most popular anime in Japan's history, here's the link: http://www.jbox.com/sazae (Quicktime required)"